Slashdot Mirror

Experimental Particle Phycist Tomasso Dorirgo http://www.science20.com/tomma... doesn't rate the 4.8 sigma excess satistics as valid, thinks the systematic uncertainitys are much bigger.

The EPA during Obama's term was out of control. Remember when they declared water to be a pollutant?

The goal now is to make regulations sensible; sometimes that requires compromise.

Look up food babe. You'd love her. She shamelessly self-promotes by looking for ingredients that sound a bit science-y and then scaremongering them.

Oh, I love her. That's how I found out that microwaves turn food evil, just like saying the words "Hitler" or "Satan" near your food does...

A year and a half ago, a 3.5 sigma 750 GeV bump appeared in the LHC data. New physics was heralded and a hundred theoretical papers attempting to explain it appeared. It was a statistical fluke and disappeared as more data was collected.

Now we're faced with a 2 sigma anomaly and the shouts of new physics are once again repeated. This is even more likely to be noise.

Physicists have been predicting new physics for 30 years. It was a major justification for the promotion of the LHC project. Nothing has been found. There's a lot of desperation at work here. It's sad.

For a good summary of all of this from a CERN experimentalist who called the 750 GeV noise, see Tommaso Dorigo

From the statement that 'four of Iceland's largest volcanoes are showing signs of impending eruption' it sounds like that is unusual. I wondered if there were other signs of tectonic activity so I went to the USGS site at http://earthquake.usgs.gov/ear... and downloaded some data. It would only let me download 20,000 events to a CSV so I took all data since 1/1/98 of 6.5+ on the Richter scale. Once that is thrown into a pivot table and a regression analysis done, it shows a very clear time linear regression of increasing moderate-intensity earthquake activity over the last 20 years. If this apparent trend is not a statistical fluke then let us hope it is due to some natural process and not a particle collider produced microscopic black hole oscillating back and forth through the earth's core exponentially accreting mass like this guy claims http://www.science20.com/big_s... since we don't actually know if Hawking Radiation is real and if it is how quickly it would make a black hole evaporate.

So therefore it cannot work, because there is no such thing as AI. The piece notes that researchers proved they succeeded because the EQR (pronounced eeker?) "detects emotions on par with an electrocardiogram (EKG), a common wearable device medical professionals use to monitor the human heart". But an EKG can't detect emotions either. It can monitor the heart, that's it. Any inference of emotion is pure voodoo. The next thing you know, they'll say it performs on a par with lie detectors. Which I suspect it does. Lie detectors are proven to be a pseudoscience after all.

You're arguing semantics. Gore ran on, among other things, tax cuts[1] and increased military spending[2]. He supported the Afghanistan War AND the Iraq War[3,4]. He chose Joe Lieberman as VP, who is quite possibly the most right-leaning Democrat in the Senate in the past 40 years[5], who vehemently supported the Iraq War -- so much so that he endorsed John McCain in 2008, supports the death penalty, introduced a bill to strip US persons of their citizenship without due process, supports censorship in entertainment, games, and online. Joe Lieberman is basically George Bush with a stronger grasp of the English language.
Back to Gore: He was aggressively free-trade[6], he wanted to keep medical marijuana illegal and double down on the War on Drugs[7], and he supported a "tough on crime" policy that included expanding the death penalty, mandatory minimum sentencing, and segregated schools for youth offenders[8]. He supported extraordinary rendition (kidnapping)[9] and pushed heavily for backdoors to encryption[10] while VP.

So yes, the GP is exactly right when he says we can't be sure Gore would have been better, and that even if he had done better on some issues, he may have been far worse on others, and thus worse overall.

1 http://www.4president.us/issue...
2 http://cjonline.com/stories/08...
3 https://www.wsws.org/en/articl...
4 http://www.science20.com/news_...
5 http://rightweb.irc-online.org...
6 http://www.ontheissues.org/Cel...
7 http://www.november.org/razorw...
8 http://www.ontheissues.org/Cel...
9 https://seekerblog.com/2007/09...
10 http://content.time.com/time/n...

If you assume any rate of improvement at all, then the games will become indistinguishable from reality, even if that rate of advancement drops by a thousand from what it is now.

So I will just leave this here....

Here's my original submission with correct URL's and "on Earth" in title.

Engineers Plan the Most Expensive Object Ever Built on Earth

Ed Davey has an interesting story at BBC about the proposed nuclear plant at Hinkley Point in Somerset , UK which at $35 billion will be the most expensive object ever put together on Earth. For that sum you could build a small forest of Burj Khalifas - the world's tallest building, in Dubai, which each cost $1.5bn, you could build almost six Large Hadron Colliders, built under the border between France and Switzerland to unlock the secrets of the universe, and at a cost a mere $5.8bn, or you could build five Oakland Bay Bridges in San Francisco, designed to withstand the strongest earthquake seismologists would expect within the next 1,500 years at a cost of $6.5bn. "Nuclear power plants are the most complicated piece of equipment we make," says Steve Thomas. "Cost of nuclear power plants has tended to go up throughout history as accidents happen and we design measures to deal with the risk."

But what about historical buildings like the the pyramids. Although working out the cost of something built more than 4,500 years ago presents numerous challenges, in 2012 the Turner Construction Company estimated it could build the Great Pyramid of Giza for $5.0bn. That includes about $730m for stone and $58m for 12 cranes. Labor is a minor cost as it is projected that a mere 600 staff would be necessary. In contrast, it took 20,000 people to build the original pyramid with a total of 77.6 million days' labor. Using the current Egyptian minimum wage of $5.73 a day, that gives a labor cost of $445m. But whatever the most expensive object on Earth is, up in the sky is something that eclipses all of these things. The International Space Station. Price tag: $110bn.

Free range chickens wander about over acres of grasslands eating bugs. Like wild caught salmon, eggs from these chickens are bright orange.

No, that just indicates what the chicken was fed, not whether it was allowed to walk around. Feeding them marigold flowers are enough to yield bright colored eggs, even if they were held in a feeder cage their whole life. Though some people claim the darker yolk is healthier. Personally I can't tell the difference in taste. Anyways, what the chicken is fed will obviously change the egg color and nutritional content, but that doesn't mean free range either tastes better or is healthier.

Organic food practices produce measurably better food (lower cholesteral, higher vitamins, lower saturated acids) with measurably lower results (50,000 survey in Britain showed lower weight and 9% lower lymphoma risk).

Hmm...While I haven't seen where you source this from, it doesn't sound likely.

First, dietary cholesterol (i.e. the cholesterol found in food that you eat) doesn't actually raise your blood cholesterol unless your liver determines that body is deficient in cholesterol, so I'm not sure how lower cholesterol is supposed to be a benefit. When people have high blood cholesterol, it's typically because they're consuming such a high amount of simple sugars (including "organic" sugar, if you want to go that route) that their liver is having to convert the excess glucose into lipids. If you've ever heard of how "foie gras" is made, this is basically what people with high cholesterol are doing to themselves. Simple sugars come from a lot of sources that you probably don't expect as well, like bread, fruit, rice, and pasta.

Second, you're going to need to be specific on vitamins, and more importantly, what the animal was fed. Yes, there will be a difference in nutritional content AND taste when it comes to say corn fed beef vs grass fed beef. Whether or not it's organic doesn't play a role in that however.

Third, saturated fats are actually not bad for you. The bad fats are trans fats, which aren't found in meat products unless they're fried or cooked using some kind of vegetable substance that has hydrogenated oils. The original fear for saturated fats came from the same false fear over dietary cholesterol. That is, they associated higher saturated fats with higher cholesterol. The reason this happened is because saturated fats from dietary sources help the body fill its own lipid needs faster, therefore when your liver produces its lipids, it creates more lipids that remain in the blood (cholesterol, triglycerides) thus making the numbers appear "worse".

Fourth and finally, you're going to see a reduction in disease among people who follow just about any controlled diet. The reason why is because these people tend to do less things that are well known to be dangerous like smoking, drinking, and drugs, and furthermore, they're more likely to exercise.

The largest cause of ecoli contamination is someone touched something's butt and then didn't wash their hands thoroughly. Use of recreational water on crops is another source of contamination.

No, it's not. There's actually a LOT of evidence that most e. coli and salmonella outbreaks are caused specifically by organic farming.

http://www.science20.com/scien...
http://www.realclearscience.co...

Organic spinach and sprouts in particular are especially risky. In fact, organic sprouts are so dangerous that big chain stores Kroger and Wal-Mart have an official policy to not carry them.

http://www.toledoblade.com/Ret...

Hate to break it to you

My guess is that it's just a lack of education on the part of the immigrant labor that's picking the produce.

Nope, this is why:

http://www.science20.com/scien...

No, that's not it at all. It's organic farming. E. coli outbreaks are NOT AT ALL uncommon. Notice how they never had this problem prior to switching to organic?

http://www.science20.com/scien...

Not only is organic food NOT beneficial from either a taste or health perspective, it's actually scientifically shown to be worse due to exactly this issue. Furthermore, it's bad from an environmental perspective because it requires more farmland, which means more water consumption and more deforestation where applicable.

Imagine a spherical screen with radius R surrounding a physical system of mass M. According to the holographic principle, all the physics that takes place within the screen can be described by bits of information that can be thought to be located on the screen. If each bit occupies an area Abit, a total of N = 4ÏR2/Abit bits is available to describe the system surrounded by the spherical screen.

...

Each bit is associated with a degree of freedom of the system being described. According to the equipartition theorem, each degree of freedom caries on average an energy ½kT, with k representing Boltzmann's constant and T the absolute temperature.

...

The holographic screen is not a physical screen but rather a thought construct created to represent the information contained in a physical system. How can such a non-entity have a temperature? The Unruh effect lends us a hand here. According to this principle, an observer being accelerated in empty space will record a non-zero temperature of that empty space.

-- Johannes Koelman explaining Erik Verlinde, who's apparently gone and won the Spinoza prize for this work (worth a few cool millions of euro?)

> It's probably too late for emissions cuts to save Kiribati (or Miami, FL for that matter) ...
Those are scary words. And unfounded, because the leaders of these islands have declined to provide any evidence that islands are sinking.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/201...

Yes, there are "climate models", which can predict anything their creators want them to predict, but no hard data (i.e. real world data) to back up these claims.

As far as Miami is concerned there is real-world data (via planometry) to show that the islands in Biscayne Bay are growing, not sinking. Yes, there are spots where the sea levels rise, but this is due to tides and natural variance. No proven link to rising CO2 levels.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/201...

In fact, satellite-based estimates of the Earth's mean global temperature have shown no statistically significant global warming for almost 20 years. Yet the CO2 levels measured in Hawaii keep on rising. (Even though man-made CO2 production has leveled off for the past two years). How do you explain that?
http://www.science20.com/news_...

"Hysteresis" you say? But the canonical explanations of "CO2-based green-house warming" all say that the warming happens immediately, because the warming is supposed to be directly proportional to the concentrations of green-house gases. Explain how a CO2 (H2O, methane, whatever) molecule, floating in the troposphere and "excited" by a recent absorption of an IR photon, doesn't transfer more thermal energy to the surrounding molecules. Are you denying the "green-house" effect?

So it's all "climate scare". It's a huge fraud, solely aimed at destroying capitalism, by crippling traditionally successful Western economies.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/201...

This kind of scientific fraud wouldn't happen if there were free and open discussions among the scientific community. But the "dissident" scientists have been harshly suppressed by the political activists. Modern-day Linsenkoism, on a scale much more intense and wider in scope than in the former Soviet Union.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/201...

They simply haven't read the memo yet. None of the "science" was new when this article was published: http://www.science20.com/gerha... A simple search for "polygraph pseudoscience" turns up 35,800 results. There should be millions of results, but I'll settle for ~36,000.

If you're subjected to a polygraph, the guy running the machinery decides whether you're trustworthy or not. You use the word "witchcraft", and it's very appropriate. Voodoo, magic, shaman, witch doctor, polygraph operator - it all amounts to the same thing. Subjective judgement, in each and every case.

You missed "except when you have to put up with the chmical wastes from solar PV production."

http://news.nationalgeographic...

http://www.science20.com/scien...

http://spectrum.ieee.org/green...

"The reporters found that the company was dumping silicon tetrachloride waste on neighboring fields instead of investing in equipment that could reprocess it, rendering those fields useless for growing crops and inflaming the eyes and throats of nearby residents. And the article suggested that the company was not alone in this practice."

" In August 2011, a factory in China’s Zhejiang province owned by Jinko Solar Holding Co., one of the largest photovoltaic companies in the world, spilled hydrofluoric acid into the nearby Mujiaqiao River, killing hundreds of fish. And farmers working adjacent lands, who used the contaminated water to clean their animals, accidently killed dozens of pigs."

[ you really don't want to go anywhere near hydrofluric acid. One drop on your hand can easily result in the entire arm being amputated.]

etc etc

Seriously: the energy cost of making solar panels is only at or just past breakeven over the life of the panels. Windfarms are in a similar situation, because the big turbines have a nasty habit of eating gearboxes (they're only profitable when stopped, but collecting subsidies)

Fusion would be nice, but I doubt we'll see it in my grandchildrens' lifespans.

In the meantime we need fission _now_ (PWR/BWR systems for the moment and LFTR-style system as soon as they're mature enough to be rolled out as civil systems). Continuing to dump carbon into the atmosphere at uncontrolled rates is likely to kill us far faster than any global warming scaremonger might realise: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

I'm not anti-gmo

Bullshit.

but to suggest that putting Salmon genes in Tomato plants is the same as just selecting between different offspring is incorrect.

This is exactly why I despise the anti-GMO movement. You and the rest of them keep making up and/or spreading bullshit lies because you have this foolish belief that natural is better and/or you have competing economic interests.

First of all, no GMO food that ever makes it to your plate ever has genes from one organism transplanted to another. The "frankenfood" is just another lie that keeps on getting repeated. But it's just that, a lie, usually spread maliciously by people who have an axe to grind against Monsanto, (sometimes they work for the snake oil organic industry who is struggling to compete with inexpensive GMO food) even though Monsanto isn't the only company that produces GMO plants. GMO foods are the result of a study called proteomics, and usually consist of fewer than 200 nucleotides (one pair of AT or GC is a nucleotide) which isn't anywhere near enough to create a full blown gene, let alone being transplanted from another organism.

Second of all, this actually happens in nature all the fucking time. In fact human DNA carries the placenta of some other animal. It permanently ended up in our genome via viral infection. It's a part of one of three full virus genomes embedded into our genome. We have some 100,000 other partial virus genomes embedded into our DNA.

Third of all, no person and no animal has ever gotten sick from GMO food. Ever. Not once. You know what though? Thousands have died and continue to die because they consumed organic food. That is, the organic farming process that produced the food that they consumed was the sole cause of their death. Tens of thousands more have gotten sick from organic food as well.

Sources: (and lots of them)

http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~a...
http://www.cgfi.org/2002/06/th...
http://www.geneticliteracyproj...
http://www.realclearscience.co...
http://www.americanthinker.com...
http://www.science20.com/chall...
http://www.washingtontimes.com...

You know what though? Your stupid little anti-GMO movement doesn't make single a peep about the evils of organic food. Why the fuck do they demand warning labels for GMO food, but they never make any demands for warning labels for organic food?

Explain that one. Why the fuck do we need warning labels for GMO food, but not organic food, when organic food is the only farming process proven to actually kill people?

Electric cars are still a niche market and will probably remain that way until batteries improve. http://www.science20.com/scien... I'd love to have an all electric car but they are too expensive and have limited range. Most of them are also too damn small (because the batteries still suck.)

I like how the anti-GMO crowd comes out and speaks about potential damages, but then ignores the real damages (and deaths) caused by organic food:

http://www.cgfi.org/2002/06/th...
http://www.realclearscience.co...
http://www.americanthinker.com...
http://www.science20.com/chall...
http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~a...

We've already had countless cases of people dying and getting sick from organic, and not a single case of anybody dying or getting sick from GMO, in spite of GMO already being consumed in bigger numbers than organic. Meanwhile we're supposed to listen to the food religion about the dangers of GMO.

Wrong, sir!

That's so wrong I'm going to let wonka rub it in.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

They were cited as violating the Lacy act of 1900. The law is 115 years old. that is a bit before Bush jr's time and a bit before his father's time as well. So... where did you get that information?

Your link did not cite the Gibson incident at all. Please cite a link that attributes the gibson raid to Bush. I think you just made that up and effectively attempted a really stupid lie.

http://www.bizjournals.com/nas...

http://www.science20.com/scien...

The issue involved fingerboards imported from India. The Lacy act involves people basically smuggling things through the customs of other countries and then into the US. The idea was to punish companies in the US that break the laws of other countries when they export things.

The problem is that Gibson did not break the Lacy act because their exports complied entirely with Indian law. The Indian government has no problem with what Gibson did. Therefore it is not possible for them to be in violation of the Lacy act.

And it should further be noted that Gibson's competitors also imported fingerboards from India and were not raided.

Gibson apparently paid the Federal government 300,000 dollars to fuck off. Because the legal fees exceeded the costs of that fine.

Welcome to the 21st century. Were the government abuses you with your own money and if you want to resist you have to spend more of your own money.

Well first off, you're linking to the debunked work of Chensheng Lu. And I don't know where you're getting your info about Europe's cold and mild winters, but here's the top link from google when I search: http://www.theguardian.com/env... Finally, you fail to address the fact that Australia is one of the heaviest users of neonics, yet they have not suffered any issues at all with bee colony collapses. Oh, and they're also free of the varroa mite incidentally.

Lie detectors don't work, all they do is give the prosecution the pretext in calling you a liar, if you are foolish enough to take one. ref.

I'd rather you be able to both communicate effectively and do reasonable design, so as to avoid embarrassing, very very expensive, or fatal problems. The idea that somehow STEM grads naturally pick up on how to communicate effectively is about as laughable as the idea that humanities students learn science through daily life, and the idea that somehow STEM education is so difficult that you have to skip out on humanities is absurd.

For the question of speed of light comparison the difference between two velocities and time points such as in average acceleration can be faster than the constant c. http://www.science20.com/scien... This article may show why. However the problem of velocity may be looked at in different ways such as invoking independent time (correction). The relativistic time parameter of correction, different from 2L/v, can be time dependent and more near the the circumference question close to the describing the earth tc ~ (2pir)/v.

Leftists are lazy, often histrionic personality disordered, and use fascism to achieve their political goals when their opponents don't acquiesce. Case in point:

http://www.science20.com/scien...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

http://news.investors.com/poli...

To be clear, them unfriending you is just an example of censorship and shutting down discourse when it suits them, which is a classic tool of fascists.

Well, we already know that individual atoms have sound so they're probably talking about sound in a way that the layman wouldn't consider is sound. At this level, they're probably talking about the vibration or movement of energy within the rubidium Bose-Einstein condensate traveling at the speed of sound and generated from the Hawking Radiation at the Sound Event Horizon.

Please see: http://www.science20.com/a_qua...

Not quite as clean a confirmation as one would like: " It would be like if I asked you to believe that by putting a dollar bill in a special laundry machine and spinning it for half an hour with some special detergent the dollar turns into a $1000 note. You are allowed to watch the machine as it does its work, but it is me who opens it and extracts the bill when it has finished its magic conversion. I doubt you would buy it."

If it sounds too good to be true...

"No arheist is so stupid" was the claim. The link refutes the absolutist "no atheist", but perhaps I misread the misspelling, and you meant something else?

Still, I should have read further back in the conversation and posted this instead:
http://www.science20.com/writer_on_the_edge/blog/scientists_discover_that_atheists_might_not_exist_and_thats_not_a_joke-139982

Oh well... maybe they can reuse the land for those totally environmentally friendly solar panels. Wait, what do we do with those when they reach end of life? http://www.science20.com/scien...

Modern solar panels are highly recyclable (they're designed for it) and they're also designed not to leach when landfilled. Yes, the old panels have these problems, but since solar has really never taken off to the feasible extent, that problem is dwarfed by orders of magnitude by coal (soot, radioactive atmospheric waste), natural gas (fracking) and by oil (etc etc) to say nothing of nuclear (even france has been dumping waste in russia.) The FUD you linked was outdated when it was new.

Oh well... maybe they can reuse the land for those totally environmentally friendly solar panels. Wait, what do we do with those when they reach end of life? http://www.science20.com/scien...

http://www.science20.com/news_... Apparently the loss of ice in the Antarctic is raising the continent as well. If this is true, how much will the levels really rise as the ice melts? Scientists, I believe are a bit too quick to assume melting ice caps are going to flood several parts of the earth, and likely being pushed to by the global warming crowd to push their BS agendas.

Can we skip the name calling in favor of some references, please?

So what do you want the deniers to be called? Gotta have some reference name.

Mann's initial investigation was regarding the infamous Hockey stick diagram.

There was broad and general support by the science community in the year's since. I'll include some citations of freely available work:

Really long url, so I provided a tinyurl

Stalagmite records http://tinyurl.com/m2yhtgl

Reconstruction of regional and global temperature for the last 11,300 years. http://www.sciencemag.org/cont...

Millenial Temperature Reconstruction. http://www.clim-past.net/3/591...

Borehole heat flux data. http://www.earth.lsa.umich.edu...

There is a lot more, but you might be able to do a little research after digesting this initial stuff.

After hackers stole the emails with the University of East Anglia, Penn State made two investigations of Mann. They cleared him of misconduct, but criticized him for sharing unpublished manuscripts.

Virginia Attorney Ken Cuccinelli, then Attorney General of Virginia (before this gets too contentious, yes, the Ken Cuccinelli that wants to make oral sex illegal) demanded that the University of Virginia release documentation of Mann's work via a Civill Investigation Demand.

The first demand was overruled by a judge. Cuccinelli revised his subpoena, and appealed to the State Supreme court. He lost there also, with the judgement that he had no authority to demand the work.

Note that Mann aided in the subsequent election efforts of Terry McCauliff, who was running against Cuccinelli in the 2013 Gubernatorial election.

Mann was investigated by the Office of the Inspector General of the National Science foundation in 2011, and exhonorated Mann of any professional misconduct.

http://www.science20.com/uploa...

At this juncture, I doubt that those who would deny AGW will accept any evidence, and would simply accuse Penn State and the National Science Foundation of corruption or worse. Note that there are many who likewise think of that University as a tool of the energy industry. Some interesting irony there.

Cuccinelli's failure to subpoena University of Virginia's records is probably the groundwork for claims that Mann refuses to share data with others. However, a pretty compelling case can be made that it was blatant politicizing of science.

Furthermore, Mann's campaigning for Cucchinelli no doubt really raised some hackles. Pretty much all out war. I suspect Mann would say he is just fighting back against those who have made it a mission to destroy him.

always Republicans ... who do this shit!

It's important to note that right now in US politics one party is completely and totally against the concept of scientific inquiry putting Newspeak-like religious rhetoric above all else.

There is no 'but the Democrats...' counterpoint on this...it's ALWAYS REPUBLICANS. It doesn't make the Democrat/Liberals better in some long-term philosophical way at all, but it forces a choice in a real-world context that alot of /.'ers can't mentally make.

(SNIP)

Good grief you are full of it. If you don't see problems with the science on both sides of the isle you aren't looking. Maybe you're simply blinded by partisanship.

The Republican Party Isn't Really the Anti-Science Party

.... twice as many Democrats as Republicans believe in astrology, a pseudoscientific medieval farce. Left-wing ideologues also frequently espouse an irrational fear of nuclear power, genetic modification, and industrial and agricultural chemistry—even though all of these scientific breakthroughs have enriched lives, lengthened lifespans, and produced substantial economic growth over the last century. .....

Stewart Brand, the 1960s environmental activist, has bemoaned opposition to genetically modified organisms as “irrational, anti-scientific, and very harmful.” The anti-GMO movement, largely a product of the political left, has reached levels of delusion, paranoia and anti-intellectualism worthy of Michele Bachmann and young-earth creationists.

Matters are more nuanced—or just plain favorable to Republicans—when it comes to the business of actually governing. Comparing the two parties' proposed funding levels for the major scientific research agencies doesn't lend itself well to narratives about who's “pro” or “anti” science. For every cheap shot a Republican member of Congress like Senator Tom Coburn has taken at National Science Foundation grants (see the unfairly maligned robo-squirrel), there are areas where Obama has undercut American leadership in basic science by favoring loan guarantees and industrial subsidies to the alternative-energy industry at the expense of science elsewhere.

We've seen this in his proposed cuts to high-energy physics, nuclear physics, planetary science, and other areas of research. Even in the much-maligned “Tea Party-dominated” House of Representatives, the GOP budget proposals provided more funding for the NSF than those of the Senate Democrats for the current 2013 fiscal year.

Are Democrats Really the "Pro-Science" Party?

A narrative has developed over the past several years that the Republican Party is anti-science. Recently, thanks to the ignorant remarks about rape made by Rep. Todd Akin, the Democrats have seized the opportunity to remind us that they are the true champions of science in America. But is it really true?

No. As we thoroughly detail in our new book, "Science Left Behind," Democrats are willing to throw science under the bus for any number of pet ideological causes – including anything from genetic modification to vaccines.

Are Republicans or Democrats More Anti-Science?
Eric Cantor and Lamar Smith: Rethinking science funding
Anti-Science Republicans Versus Anti-Science Democrats: The Comparison

> If you replace a 100W incandescent bulb with a 25W CFL and run it for 3 hour/day, you save 82KWh/year, or around $10/year at 12 cents/KWh.

Sure. But do I really care about the ... 2 1/2 cents a day savings (that's in my head, don't hold me to it), or am I willing to pay that less than three cents a day for a bulb that comes on instantly and doesn't release mercury if it breaks?

Mind you, there's roughly 32 bulbs in use in my house, and many of them are CFLs, where it makes sense to use them. Just pointing out that they were never really a significant savings, and there exists some compelling reasons not to use them.

Sure. If carbon levels go up precipitously for, say, 50 years, and the climate does NOT warm, after having corrected for things like solar radiation output, distance from the sun, etc, I would be convinced that CO2 emissions have nothing to do with warming.

Odd, not a single mention of human CO2 emissions, nor any sign of catastrophe in your observation that you would accept as falsification. It seems you're looking at a lesser statement of "CO2 drives warming", although you leave an "etc" in there that you obviously cannot enumerate, and would use as an ad hoc special pleading for any violation of your belief.

It's obvious from the paleo record that indeed, we do have historical points in time where CO2 rises, and temperature *falls* - heck, the past 17 years, CO2 has risen and temperatures have remained *flat*, even though solar radiation output hasn't varied much, and the distance from the sun hasn't changed...I suppose you could buy into the cosmic ray hypothesis and the solar magnetic field variation, but then you've added a variable that we have no control over that wildly overrides even our most active CO2 emissions.

Since human activity is, in fact, increasing CO2 levels

You seem to believe that CO2 levels are simply based on unconnected inputs and outputs...I think you fail to realize that the CO2 cycle is in fact *dynamic*, and it *reacts* to changes in inputs and outputs in non-linear ways.

Your "fact" isn't quite as factual as I think. See: http://www.science20.com/news_releases/where_does_co2_go_mystery_missing_sinks

Computer models have been built that, in effect, create a 'new world', that can be used to test these sorts of hypotheses.

Computer models aren't tests - they're fiction.

Think about it - they've got *dozens* of computer models that all *disagree* - by what criteria are you going to decide which one is correct?

Hell, do you have *any* models which have any sort of falsification criteria at all?

My religion, if it is a religion, is that science gets it right much more often than it gets it wrong.

Well, I have no religion, and the exercise of science is not about getting things "right" more often than "wrong" - that's a complete misunderstanding of the scientific method. Science is the process of learning *when* you're wrong - and instead you've convinced yourself that it's just "right" from the get go without any sort of scrutiny...truly a religious epiphany, I'm sure :)

In order to understand *when* you're wrong, you need to have a necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement. Thus far, the CAGW religion has none, just like creationism has none.

but those incorrect explanations are mostly due to missing facts

We discover explanations are incorrect when the explanations are falsifiable, and we observe the falsification. To think that explanations are only incorrect because we haven't found the right "facts" is like defending the historicity of noah's ark by saying we're just missing the proper evidence :)

So, yes, I believe what scientists tell me.

You shouldn't outsource your rational thought processes. That's the hallmark of religion.

You should double check the data.

You should look for falsifiability.

You should look for alternative explanations.

You should challenge your own beliefs with fervor and great effort, because in the end, the easiest person to fool is yourself.

The problem is by failing you'd mess it up for everyone else, by contaminating Mars with Earth micro-organisms, you have no idea how valuable a Pristine Mars with probably independently evolved life is potentially for science and for humanity. If you could somehow colonize Mars with humans without bringing their micro-organisms along as well, but no-one knows a way to do that. There is a way around that too, to explore Mars telerobotically to start with. Why such a rush to land humans on the surface when the surface is cold as Antarctica, near vacuum, and far less habitable than the coldest driest deserts on Earth (the McMurdo dry valleys in Antarctica and the Atacama desert are both far more habitable for humans than Mars)? Is easier to supply and maintain a colony in orbit, the Molniya orbit is easier to get to in terms of delta v than the Moon. Then you can control telerobots on the surface instead. See: http://www.science20.com/robert_inventor/blog/ten_reasons_not_live_mars_great_place_explore-118531 See http://www.science20.com/robert_inventor039s_column/blog/how_valuable_pristine_mars_humanity_opinion_piece-115954

The problem is by failing you'd mess it up for everyone else, by contaminating Mars with Earth micro-organisms, you have no idea how valuable a Pristine Mars with probably independently evolved life is potentially for science and for humanity. If you could somehow colonize Mars with humans without bringing their micro-organisms along as well, but no-one knows a way to do that. There is a way around that too, to explore Mars telerobotically to start with. Why such a rush to land humans on the surface when the surface is cold as Antarctica, near vacuum, and far less habitable than the coldest driest deserts on Earth (the McMurdo dry valleys in Antarctica and the Atacama desert are both far more habitable for humans than Mars)? Is easier to supply and maintain a colony in orbit, the Molniya orbit is easier to get to in terms of delta v than the Moon. Then you can control telerobots on the surface instead. See: http://www.science20.com/robert_inventor/blog/ten_reasons_not_live_mars_great_place_explore-118531 See http://www.science20.com/robert_inventor039s_column/blog/how_valuable_pristine_mars_humanity_opinion_piece-115954

As ridiculously shallow as the TFA is, there is some work on nanoparticle-liquid suspensions:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S135943111200511X

Nanoparticles in Thermoelectric Power Plant Cooling Fluids

Nanoparticle Additives Boost Industrial Cooling Systems (That Means Saving Energy)

I'll try to make sense of it (can someone more competent provide a Cliff's-notes version, please?).

Meanwhile, sorry to rain on the bash party.

The citation is the WIkipedia article on zero-point energy I already posted. An examples from it: "In quantum field theory, the fabric of space is visualized as consisting of fields, with the field at every point in space and time being a quantum harmonic oscillator, with neighboring oscillators interacting. In this case, one has a contribution of from every point in space, resulting in a calculation of infinite zero-point energy in any finite volume; this is one reason renormalization is needed to make sense of quantum field theories."

See James P. Hogan's 'Voyage from Yesteryear" sci-fi novel for an example of the social effects of such a scientific observation on optimism about the future vs. today's pessimism about "running out of whale oil" or whatever the fashionable energy source is these days.
http://www.science20.com/science_amp_supermodels/have_we_reached_peak_whale_oil-7699
"My main concern is that my calculations show we are approaching peak whale oil and no one seems to be listening. Inspect my numbers below. If my estimations are correct we have surpassed a population of 24,000,000 persons, far more than the estimates of 17.000,000 from the last census. There simply are not enough whales to ..."

What? No... You're completely wrong. I don't even know where to start. Not even radiation can escape a blackhole. The radiation blackholes cause, is hawking radiation.

Actually, it is a bit early to be completely sure about how black holes work. According to the Schwarzchild metric applicable to nonrotaing uncharged black holes there are actually two singularities, one at the event horizon and one in the middle. The the consensus seems to be that a free falling observer will not notice passing the event horizon, but there is some uncertainty about what a but a far observer will observe. One hypothesis is that she will simply see things disappearing across the event horizon.

Another hypothesis is that objects falling against the horizon will never actually reach it. This latter hypothesis is highly nonintuitive but it is a direct consequence of the Schwarzschild metric and can be interpreted as spacetime being extremely, perhaps infinitely "stretched" close to the event horizon. From this point of view, the physics involving Hawking radiation happens close to but never really on the "other" side of the horizon.

This perspective on the anatomy of black holes is called "black hole duality" or "black hole complementarity". It is conjecture, but it is consistent with mainstream physics and advocated by some highly compentent physicists including Stanford professor Leonard Susskind and Nobel laureate Gerard t'Hooft.

http://www.science20.com/alpha_meme/black_hole_duality_general_relativity_without_singularities

My hunch is there are no "real" portable bomb detectors (other than a trained dog), and government middle managers under pressure to buy bomb detectors bought the only thing on the market claiming to do that regardless of whether it worked or not. They knew it didn't work, but the politicians further up the chain didn't care, they just wanted to be able to say they'd purchased bomb detectors and people would be safe.

Yeah, about that...

http://www.science20.com/gerhard_adam/how_reliable_are_sniffing_dogs-95956

Restaurants and diners have been salting stale bitter coffee for years to remove the bitter taste of coffee that has sat too long on the pot warmer waiting for customers. Often salt would accumulate throughout the day as each waitress salted it a bit more, and by evening the larger coffee dispensers would be quite salty.

The practice came into disfavor with the overreaction to salt in the diet.

Actually, they've already finished analyzing this backlog of data at Fermilab of which you speak. Although there is a bump in the data, it is not enough to claim a discovery, and certainly not enough to establish that the properties of the bump make it a Higgs. http://www.science20.com/quantum_diaries_survivor/25_sigma_higgs_signal_tevatron-91654 You can't "replicate" a discovery with a non-discovery, so that doesn't save the original statement.

While you're right that higher luminosity makes a difference in Higgs searches, and that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has a higher luminosity than Fermilab (about 10 times better in fact), higher center of mass energy also makes a difference. According to this resource, the higher energy results in better production cross section of Higgs at the LHC, also about a factor of 10 improvement. http://www.slac.stanford.edu/econf/C020121/overhead/J_Womers.pdf

There's an intuitive reason for that. Namely, at a proton collider, the center of mass energy is spread out among the quarks which are themselves moving around within the proton. So although the protons are at 1 TeV (or 7 TeV at the LHC) and it seems like plenty to make a Higgs, the quarks don't individually carry the same punch, and it's the quarks that have to make the Higgs. Intuitively, higher luminosity translates into more opportunities to make a Higgs and higher cms energy translates into more ways that the quarks can make a Higgs per collision. Both are improved at the LHC, but my bias is to tend to favor the higher energy solution simply because background increases with luminosity too. But signal-to-noise ratio improves with better production cross sections from higher energy.

Not to belabor the point, nor to embarrass the original commenter, who was plainly hoping for some confirmation good news to come out of Fermilab. But the truth remains: Fermilab cannot replicate the discovery on the data they do have (otherwise they would have claimed discovery before the LHC), nor will they ever replicate the discovery as the collider program is shut down and even if it wasn't, the tevatron is simply not the right machine to do it. It makes me sad more than anything else.

And it makes me sad that the crowd sourced moderation system at Slashdot would upmod a false statement after a contrary true statement was offered in a matter-of-fact but friendly manner. Well, ok, not really. More like LOL! My friends at Fermilab will get a chuckle this morning to hear that some moderator at slashdot thinks there is an active Higgs program at Fermilab that is going to replicate the Cern results.

This has been studied time and time again.
Any sport that involves any repeated impact to the head - whether football, boxing or soccer will result in brain injury.

Here is the paper: https://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1493302/files/PAPER-2012-043.pdf

Some blogs discussing the significance of the result:

http://www.science20.com/quantum_diaries_survivor/lhcb_evidence_rare_decay_bs_dimuons-96311

http://motls.blogspot.com/2012/11/superstringy-compactifications.html#more

http://profmattstrassler.com/

Particle physics isn't my field, but neither the paper nor the blog posts seem to be interpreting it, as the BBC does, as evidence against supersymmetry.

Wow! The list of co-authors is almost as long as the article!

Here is the paper: https://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1493302/files/PAPER-2012-043.pdf

Some blogs discussing the significance of the result:

http://www.science20.com/quantum_diaries_survivor/lhcb_evidence_rare_decay_bs_dimuons-96311

http://motls.blogspot.com/2012/11/superstringy-compactifications.html#more

http://profmattstrassler.com/

Particle physics isn't my field, but neither the paper nor the blog posts seem to be interpreting it, as the BBC does, as evidence against supersymmetry.

It's only arrogance if you're wrong. If you are correct, it's knowledge. If you're wrong, it's arrogance. Sadly, many employers do not understand this little bit of wisdom. [Jane Q. Public, 2012-10-25]

Jane, are you sure you want to use that criterion? Let's reminisce...

How do they know they were the same neutrinos they launched out? [Dr Max]

... they know the beginning ratio and ending ratio of the different types. If they are not the same, then some must have flipped (or rotated, or whatever language the neutrino guys use these days). [global_diffusion]

Not necessarily. They could be different neutrinos, caused by atoms in the way absorbing some neutrinos and emitting others. I am not sure but I suspect that is what GP [DrMax] was getting at. Rather than evidence of neutrinos actually changing from one type to another, it seems just as likely (more likely?) that intervening matter performed a conversion. Just as, say, a crystal or a gas can "change" a laser's color by absorbing photons and then emitting others of a different frequency, maybe matter is absorbing these neutrinos and emitting others with different properties. [Jane Q. Public, 2011-06-17]

Nonlinear crystals can change a laser's color by absorbing photons and then emitting others of a different frequency because photons are mediators of the electromagnetic force, so they interact with comparatively large (~10^(-10) m) electron clouds. But neutrinos only interact via gravity (irrelevant here) and the weak force which has a comparable range of ~10^(-18) m. Since the cross section determines how likely interactions are, neutrinos are roughly ten thousand trillion times less likely to interact with matter than photons. This is just an approximation, but experiments yield similarly tiny cross sections.

If neutrinos have to interact with intervening matter before hitting the detector, an extra interaction is involved. That's why Chris Burke pointed out that detecting neutrino flavor change due to an interaction with intervening matter would depend on the square of the interaction probability. Detection in the conventional flavor oscillation theory just depends on the interaction probability because it only involves a single interaction, so it's trillions of times more likely to explain the observed electron neutrino events.

In fact, that T2K paper acknowledged a much bigger source of noise on page 8: the muon neutrino beam was slightly contaminated by electron neutrinos. This contamination doesn't invalidate their results because it only explains ~1.5 out of 6 observed electron neutrino events.

Anyway, the processes that change a laser's color are given names like "second-harmonic generation" (where a crystal combines two photons into one, commonly used in green laser pointers) and

The same organic molecules that Earth life uses have shown to form under a number of conditions and membrane forming lipids are also common so while there's very little chance it would be identical it's likely that extraterrestrial life would still have many things in common biochemically, but yeah you'd need more than just an earth life-tuned DNA sequencer to be able to read and recreate it.

Unless the theory that Earth and Mars seeded each other with life via meteorite ejecta is true, in which case Earth life and theoretical Mars life may have the same common ancestor.

How much do i have to pay to get a complementing article about an fifth force between neutrinos in physics.

Here's the link for the article. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0278691512005637

I'm fairly underwhelmed with it. First is the issue you mention of "how many negative results did he not publish?" that is rather insidious. Then there's all the issues that come from his small data set size, and the fact that he did not use large portions of his actual data. And can't be bothered to report it. Or provide it. But it just wasn't useful data, for reasons not explained. I wouldn't accuse the authors of misconduct (no doubt the authors believe their ms is true), but the practices described is definitely a great way to get a false positive. Briefly skimming the interwebs show other people have some statistical issues with this too. http://www.science20.com/science_20/blog/gm_maize_causes_tumors_rats_here_how_experts_responded-94259

Sadly, only "GM crops evil!" will get reported, because it plays into a social narrative. Not "shitty stats continues to be shitty!"